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The dark structure in the middle of the drawing looks like a cottage, but it is actually a stack of peat. In Drenthe, peat was stacked in the form of a house with a sloping roof. Van Gogh gave the stack of peat a central place in his composition and showed its reflection in the ditch.

He wrote to his brother Theo that at dusk the fields of Drenthe were transformed into a 'sublime' place, 'when that vast, sun-scorched earth stands out dark against the delicate lilac tints of the evening sky, and the very last fine dark blue line on the horizon separates earth from sky'.